Adam Czajka Asks: Is That Eyeball Dead or Alive?

Recent studies on iris “liveness” detection, carried out by Dr. Adam Czajka at both the University of Notre Dame and Warsaw University of Technology, Poland, are discussed in an article presented in IEEE Spectrum. His mission is to prevent iris sensors from accepting a high-res photo of someone’s eye, or - in a grislier scenario - an eyeball plucked from the owner’s head.

The latter possibility, known so far only from Hollywood movies, becomes more serious due to Czajka’s research on post-mortem iris recognition. Together with his Polish colleagues (Mateusz Trokielewicz and Dr. Piotr Maciejewicz), Czajka learned that even many hours after death, irises are perfectly viable, which makes the grisly scenario mentioned earlier perfectly plausible. This is why the presentation attack detection is so important for biometric applications.

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